A new antimalaria drug candidate

20 June 2017

Currently, malaria is treated with a mixture of medicines including artemisinin, isolated from a herb that has been used for a long time in traditional Chinese medicine.

Unfortunately, the malaria parasite is developing resistance to artemisinin. Therefore, large research consortia are working hard to find new ways to treat malaria. In this way, a new synthetic substance called E209 was discovered which was found to be very active against many malaria species, except for the dormant stages of the malaria parasite, the hypnozoites.

The new drug, in combination with other newly developed promising compounds, may potentially provide an effective alternative to the current drug treatment for malaria. This large-scale study to which BPRC researchers have contributed was published in Nature Communications (http://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms15159).